Two giants of Jewish scholarship, legendary Hebrew University Judaics professors in the tradition of legendary Hebrew University Judaics professors – Yehudah Bauer and Paul Mendes-Flohr – passed away during the holidays. They were very different men, working in different disciplines, yet they both believed that scholarship itself could be “an expression of utmost respect for the human spirit” and that the way to solve conflicts in the Middle East started with intellectual honesty, a willingness to listen to the other side, and to subject to critical scrutiny our most closely-held beliefs. The influence of both men will be felt here for generations, and we are all better off for it.

Transcript:

Almost exactly a hundred years ago today on the first candle of Hanukkah in 1924, the great American-born Reform Rabbi, Uta Magnus, took to the dais on Mount Scopus before as renowned an audience as Jerusalem could put forth.

The British High Commissioner, Sir Herbert Samuel, Muslim and Christian dignitaries, heads of learned societies, leaders of Zionist organizations all gathered to inaugurate the Institute for Jewish Studies of the Hebrew University, the cornerstone of which Hebrew University had been laid six years earlier by Albert Einstein and Chaim Weizmann, and which Hebrew University would officially open five months later in April 1925, during which five-month interval Rabbi Uta Magnus would be appointed as Chancellor of the new university.

Magnus said on that Hanukkah, quote, “We make a blessing of thanks for God who performed the miracles for our forefathers in those days and in these times,” and Magnus continued, now referring to that very evening, “Is this not a miracle?”

The Institute for Jewish Studies they were gathered to inaugurate at the soon-to-be-launched Hebrew University, Magnus said, would be, quote, “a holy place, a sanctuary in which to learn and teach without fear or hatred all that Judaism had forged and created from the time of the Bible to our day,” end quote.

The question that the scholars of the Institute would ask, Magnus said, is, quote, “What is Judaism?

We have come to create here a place which everyone who seeks to clarify and investigate the essence of Judaism will cloister,” end quote.

The Institute of Jewish Studies will be a place where people of very different sorts and very different views gathered, but still they will be united by their love for the methods of science and scholarship and by their fearless embrace of truth, whatever it be, and by Jerusalem itself as, quote, “There is no place in the world better suited for this study, guided by the ideal of pure science, than Jerusalem, as it is said from Zion, Torah will come and the word of God from Jerusalem,” end quote.

The strangest thing about all this soaring rhetoric is there was something to it.

At the Institute for Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University, some of the greatest scholars of the age, and of any age really, gathered.

This was already true of the committee that first set up the Institute, which had the most renowned Hebrew poet of the day, Chaim Nachman Bialik, and the revered philosopher, essayist, and founder of cultural Zionism, Ahad Ha’am, and the great historian Yisrael Klausner, and the great Hebraicist and Arabist David Yalin, who founded the Hebrew Language Committee.

And it was equally true of the first scholars who came to study and teach at the Institute, people like Gershom Scholem, the towering scholar of Kabbalah, and the great neo-Kantian philosopher Shmuel Yugo Bergman, a school chum of Franz Kafka and Max Brod, and the pioneering historian of medieval Spanish Judaism, Yitzhak Bair, whose grandkid was for a time in Arhavura, and the great historian of Zionism, and eventually Minister of Education soon after the state was created, Ben-Zion D’nor, and the great existentialist, dialogical ethicist, Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, whose great-grandson is my friend, philosopher of science and former finance minister Yuval Steinitz.

And Yuda Magnus’ proleptic praise was true, too, of the first generation of students at the Institute for Jewish Studies, philosopher Natan Rotenstreich, whose PhD was supervised by Shmuel Yugo Bergman, and who Bergman also shepherded into the fold the great Mamanidean philosopher Shlomo Pinas.

And there was the great Jewish social historian Yaakov Katz, who was brought into the Hebrew University of Ben-Zion D’nor, and the great historian of Jewish life and culture in Poland, Yisrael Halperin.

And Gershom Scholem, he taught the great historian and philosopher of Hasidut and Kabbalah, Rivka Schatz Oufenheimer, and this great chain of scholarship calls to mind the first verse of the first chapter of Pirkei Avot, the ethics of the father.

Moses received the Torah at Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua, Joshua to the elders and the elders to the prophets, and the prophets to the men of the great assembly.

Amazingly, this great chain of scholarship, it never really ended.

Is this not a miracle, as Yuda Magnus put it?

Because Yisrael Halperin, Yitzhak Berg and Ben-Zion D’nor, they trained Shlomo Ettinger, a great historian of anti-Semitism in modern times, and Shlomo Pinas, he trained Moshe Idel, who brilliantly rewrote all we thought we knew about Jewish mysticism, and Shlomo Pinas, he also trained Eliezer Schweid, who in his time at the Hebrew University shifted forever the way we understand Jewish education, Jewish holidays, Jewish literature, Jewish culture.

And Shlomo Pinas, he trained Professor Shalom Rosenberg, a philosopher in whose work on Jewish ethics you find Aristotle, Kant, and Nietzsche in comfortable dialogue with Maimonides and Levinas.

And Rivka Schatz-Uffenheimer, she trained Rachel Elior, today one of the greatest historians and philosophers of Hasidut and mysticism that we have, and who was my own teacher.

And all this is on my mind because in the past weeks, two of our generation’s great Hebrew University professors of Jewish studies have died.

One is Yuda Bauer, who got his PhD under the supervision of Yisrael Halperin in 1960, after a long, twisting route that started with a happy childhood in Prague, where Yuda Bauer was born in 1926, as he wrote just a few weeks ago, quote, “To parents who loved each other with a great love, Uli and Victor Bauer,” end quote, and who loved Yuda as he loved them, quote, “Ever since I was a kid, I saw in my father more or less my God up until today.

I look like him.

My body language is identical to him.

My voice is his voice.

I simply impersonate him.

I haven’t reached his enormous level of morality, though, and that is a shame,” end quote.

Victor Bauer was close friends in Prague with Hugo Bergman, and he traveled in circles with Max Brod, whom he did not much like.

On March 14, 1939, the day before Nazi soldiers entered Prague, at seven in the evening, the three Bauers boarded the very last train that it was still legal for them to take.

Max Brod was on the same train, one cabin up, and so were many other Jewish refugees and communists, and the train traveled to the Polish border, and from there on to Krakow, and from Krakow to Consenza in Italy, where the Bauers boarded the SS Hartz Ion, a 1907 Danish steamship bought by Palestine Maritime Lloyd, making it the first land of Israel ship with a land of Israel Jewish captain, though the ship would soon thereafter be nationalized by the Brits as part of their war effort, and sunk a year later by a Nazi U-boat in the North Atlantic as it sailed from Liverpool to Savannah, Georgia, with a cargo of scotch and fertilizer.

The ship took the Bauers via Istanbul to Haifa, along with their lift containing books, lots of books, Ute Bauer said, and their family piano and furniture.

Ute Bauer was just before the bar mitzvah he never ended up happening in the event it was lost in the move, and the family, they weren’t much for Jewish ritual anyway.

In Haifa, Victor Bauer got a job playing jazz in a sailor’s bar.

Money was tight, and soon the piano was sold for cash, and then the stamp collection.

Ute went to a Haifa school called Chugim, where he fell under the influence of a history teacher named Rachel Grolek.

It was then that he decided that he too would be a historian.

When high school ended in 1944, Bauer joined the underground and then the Palmach.

A couple of years after that, he won a British colonial fellowship meant to bring British culture to the locals.

Ute Bauer was the only Jew ever to win one in humanities in Palestine, and he took a train to Cairo with the Muslim and Christian Palestinian fellows, flying with them to London, and from there catching the train to Cardiff in Wales, where he did his BA and MA in history, taking time off in 1948 to come back and fight in the War of Independence.

After his master’s with a thesis on the Palmach, he settled on Kibbutz Shoval, working first in the fields harvesting hay and then splitting his time between the cow shed and the dining room.

Four years in, he petitioned Shoval’s secretariat to let him start his PhD at the Hebrew University, and when they turned him down, he took his case to the Kibbutz Assefa Klalit, the plenum of all the Kibbutz’s members, and the vote to approve his one day a week of study went 80 to 4 in favor, the 4 being the members of the secretariat who stood by their original decision, damn it.

From then on, and for decades that followed, Yudah Bauer was always two things, a scholar and a Kibbutznik.

His PhD was again about the Palmach, but soon after he finished it in 1960, Abba Kovner, the great partisan leader in Vilna and later poet and public intellectual, pressed Yudah Bauer to focus his considerable talents as a historian on the Holocaust, which Kovner felt the professors were ignoring, and when they didn’t ignore it, they were getting it wrong.

Yudah Bauer’s first article on the Holocaust came after he found a cache of letters written in 1946 by kids in Marseilles on their way to Palestine with youth aliyah to their Christian parents back in Europe who had hidden them during the war.

One of the letters went, “Dear Mama, Mama, how are you?

For me, things are very bad.

I am still in France.

I am freezing.

How does Father feel, and how does Kazio feel?

I am very curious.

Do letters arrive, or do you not want to reply now?

I don’t expect an answer because I am here today and somewhere else tomorrow.

How is Grandma?

Mama, it would have been better if you had handed me over to the Germans than how you handed me to these Jews who torture me so, or it would have been better if you had drowned me.

With them, all you hear is oy vey and nothing else.

But in any case, sometime the day will come and I will pay them back and they will get their just desserts.

I walk around dirty as a chimney sweep because they don’t give me anything to wash with.

I just have to go around with lice, though up until now I haven’t had lice, but I think they, the lice, know that I wear my patron saint medallion.

I have three girlfriends and I am the fourth.

One is named Roma, the second Irena, and the third Maritzia, and they have hymnals and rosaries and medallions.

It is a shame that I do not have prayer beads.

Goodbye Mama.”

The letters the children wrote in Marseilles to their Christian families, they were never sent.

The organizers of the Youth Aliyah did not see what good could come from such ties, and when the kids came to Palestine, they were sent to boarding schools and then mostly to kibbutzim.

And Judah Bauer knew from the youth movement one of the heads of this operation and called him and said, “I have this letter.

I cannot make out the signature.

Do you remember a girl who could have written this?”

And as Judah Bauer tells the story.

“He said, ‘Yes, I do.

She’s your next door neighbor on kibbutz Shoval, the secretary of your kibbutz.’

I practically fell off the chair, yeah?

And her name is Sabina Hoffman.

I knocked at her door because she was literally my neighbor.”

And Sabina Hoffman tells Judah Bauer her story, how she went into hiding with her family, leaving their valuables with their Polish neighbors, and when the money ran out, her mother went to retrieve some of their stuff to sell on the black market, but the neighbors, they didn’t want to part with the goods, so they called the Nazis who shot her mother dead in the street.

And her father sent her and her brother to peasant families who promised to watch over them, but one of the families called the Nazis who shot her father and her brother also in the street.

And she, Sabina, she was sold from family to family as a farmhand, slave laborer, until finally one family took her in, and that was the mama, father, and grandma from the letter.

And what Judah Bauer learned was something he’d always known from his own experience, that these stories of the Holocaust were more complicated than the rabbis, the politicians, and even the professors ever let on.

For one thing, as Judah Bauer wrote in his first book, which was called “The Jewish Emergence from Powerlessness,” that lambs-to-the-slaughter, dona-dona-dona story of Jews showing endless passivity in the face of Nazi muskulkraft, that story’s got things upside down on their head.

The Jews in pre-modern Europe were without power, sure, but this had started to change before anyone had ever heard of Nazis, and in the Holocaust and what followed it straight away, one saw that clearly.

There were the partisans and the resistance, but bigger than that was the bricha movement and all the illegal immigration that followed the Holocaust, which is evidence that as far as Jews in power went, “their period of adjustment was surprisingly brief, and their overall reaction was by and large not that of demoralization, but of nonviolent and occasionally violent defiance of the Nazis and indeed of the world.”

And there were other truisms about the Holocaust that Judah Bauer gave his distinguished life over to showing were not as true as we think.

Nobody comes clean in this story, not even the Jews, nobody.

Not even the Danes who saved, you know, the Danish rescue.

There were 6,000 Danes who joined the SS, come on now, yeah?

There were collaborators in Norway, in Serbia, everywhere.

And Jews who betrayed other Jews?

I can tell you a lot of stories about that.

Nobody comes clean.

So in all groups you have at least some people who are on the positive side, just as you have some people who are on the negative side in the positive story.

So the stereotyping I don’t accept.

The Poles were worse than the Germans.

Come on now, who saved you exactly?

Well, there are exceptions.

Really?

How many?

Do you know how many?

Or the other way around.

I was saved by Poles.

Come on now, your neighbor was betrayed by Poles.

What’s that?

Ukrainians.

Same thing.

Russians.

And then you have positive stories with negative people.

Oskar Schindler?

One of the worst possible types in the world.

But he rescued 1,200 Jews.

You have the same thing on the Jewish side, yeah?

In the Warsaw Ghetto there were wonderful people.

And then you have Jewish spies of the Gestapo in the ghetto.

So stereotyping doesn’t work.

It was this belief that people and peoples are complex, and something like the Holocaust offers no lessons that can be condensed down to a poster or a pin never again, that one finds over and over in the 44 books Jutta Bauer wrote and edited, which were translated into dozens of languages.

The convenient moralization of the Holocaust, turning a complex human event into a homily, Jutta Bauer hated that.

The worst offenders were politicians, Israeli politicians most of all.

Jutta Bauer said of Israeli politicians, Benjamin Netanyahu first among them, and of the Holocaust, quote, “They interpret it in a nationalistic way.

They use the Holocaust as a tool for politics.

This is especially true of the prime minister.

He’s got no clue, simply no idea what happened.

He doesn’t know anything about the Holocaust,” end quote.

It’s not that as Jutta Bauer saw it, there is nothing to learn from the Holocaust.

It’s that there is nothing simple and partisan that we can or should learn from the Holocaust.

And it will never teach us that our side is right.

A couple of months ago, Jutta Bauer was interviewed on the radio about the war since October 7th, and at 98 he was brilliant and sharp, and he said, “Our response shouldn’t be similar to what we accuse others of.

And we are murderers in the Gaza Strip.

So I think we are using tools that were used against us.”

Our reaction does not need to look like the things we blame others for having done to us.

And we are murdering people in the Gaza Strip.

I think we are using tools that were used against us.

I think we need to fight a different war, a war first of all against Hamas.

And every warlike act by Israel must be accompanied by humanitarian aid to the people not fighting in Gaza in the most serious and massive way.

And then maybe there will be some sort of positive outcome, though it is impossible to know.

It is impossible to know, Jutta Bauer believed, because knowing things is hard, and it comes only with long, careful, and close study.

Just in that same interview, what he thought the future would bring, Jutta Bauer said that save for his own death, he had no idea, because all he could know was what could be studied and the future cannot be studied.

But if we pay close attention to the past, it may help us to be more decent in the present.

Jutta Bauer believed in scholarship.

He believed it was possible to understand things that matter, but only if you give yourself over to it with an open mind and heart, and knowing that what you will find will never be encapsulated by a slogan like “Yachad Nenatzeach”—”Together we will win.”

This week, Haaretz published an obituary that Jutta Bauer wrote for himself, apologizing for going beyond what he knew to be his role at this moment, “to be lying silently, deaf to the praises and veneration that might come.”

Jutta Bauer wrote, “They say the process of dying is unpleasant, but I cannot tell how it went with me.

I cannot report about it.

Any historian knows that oral testimonies must be cross-checked, but in this case that is hard to do.”

This a scholar’s apology for his last word not meeting the canons of scholarship.

The other great Hebrew University Institute of Jewish Studies scholar who died lately is Paul Mendesflor, who was brought to Jerusalem by Jacob Katz, who soon thereafter would become the rector of the university, and he was brought also by the great sociologist Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt, who got his PhD from Martin Buber, though young Paul Mendesflor was often seen on campus with Ernst Simon and Nathan Rottenstreich.

Paul Mendesflor’s own doctorate he wrote at Brandeis, a then-still-new university with aspirations for Jewish studies that rivaled Judah Magnus’ hope for the Hebrew University.

Dying under the great Mendelssohn scholar and historian and philosopher of Jewish mysticism, the Berlin-trained rabbi Professor Alexander Altman, as well as theologian and philosopher Nachum Glatzer, whose Goethe University in Frankfurt PhD he wrote under Martin Buber and Paul Tillich, and also Paul Mendesflor studied with the sociologist and historian of Zionism, Ben Halperin.

When he published his dissertation as a book called “From Mysticism to Dialogue, Martin Buber’s Transformation of German Social Thought,” Paul Mendesflor wrote of his teachers in America, quote, “At Brandeis University, I learned that, as an exalting and inhumane activity, scholarship enjoys a dual axis of pathos and ethos.

Each of my mentors in his uniquely graced fashion exemplified the ideal of academic excellence to be both a passion for ideas and a meticulous attention to detail as an expression of utmost respect for the human spirit.”

It was at Brandeis that Paul Flore fell in love with Rita Mendes, who is an artist of renown now, and they married, and when they had their first kid, both changed their names to the hyphenate Mendesflor as a message to their children, among other things, that they are heirs of both Ashkenazi and Sephardi worlds, the Mendeses being descendants of, among others, Baruch Shponoza.

I met Paul Mendesflor through the agent we shared.

Rick Balkin is his name, and Rick is a man who says what he thinks, often gruffly, never trying to be fancy because he hates heirs, and once Rick said to me, “This Mendesflor, you could miss it because he speaks so softly, but he’s a prophet.

He’s also a mensch,” Rick said, “and prophet and mensch are two things that usually don’t go together.”

I said, “A prophet, a mensch, and a scholar, three things that usually don’t go together, a prophet and a mensch engaged, a scholar detached, a prophet and a scholar about getting others to accept what they know to be true, a mensch trying to see themselves the truths that other people hold, a mensch and a scholar trying to preserve things, and a prophet often is not trying to break stuff so new and better stuff can take its place.”

Paul Mendesflor wrote 30-odd books, editing 44, including the collection of writings of Martin Buber in German, and he put out more than 500 articles, mostly covering the German Jewish philosophical tradition from the middle of the 19th to the middle of the 20th centuries, though he wrote about a great many other things, too, about Walter Benjamin, about Max Weber, about Karl Marx, about postmodernism, about the films of Igmar Bergman, and so it would be indecent and unjust to try to describe in a few short minutes what he investigated, thought, believed, and achieved, but it is fair, I think, to say that his greatest love and inspiration and lodestar was Martin Buber, a philosopher of great subtlety whom Paul Mendesflor read with great subtlety, and at the core of it was an idea that Paul Mendesflor returned to over and over again, that one must really see other people in all their complexity, in all their sanctity.

“Buber says we have fundamentally two ways of relating to the world, two fundamental attitudes, and we can greet the world as objects, as its, but when we treat our fellow human beings as it, of course, we’re offending, we’re violating their humanity, and there are many subtle ways we treat people as its.

And we categorize people as tall, short, older, younger, infirm, swift in foot, black, yellow, white, male, female, and all of this is, of course, to reduce the other two categories.

As Ralph Ellison, the great author, said, that we see people, but if we do not attend to their inner reality, they are fundamentally invisible.

And these categories render other people invisible.

We neglect to understand their fellow humanity, but they have, in the language of religious traditions, a soul, their own experience, their own joys, their own woe, anguish, and hopes, their own inner reality, just as we ourselves have an inner reality.

And that’s what we meant by the categories I, vow, and I.

It sounds simple, but of course, it is often what we fail to do.

It followed for Paul Mandersloor that if we see other people as they are in their complexity, in their sanctity, only then can we enter with them into a dialogue that will let us imperfectly but still beautifully bring together our distinct worlds.

The poet Ludwig Strauss referred to faith as projecting one onto “islands of messianic time where one periodically sojourns to behold a future and blessed reality.”

For Buber, dialogue is an act of faith, a reaching out in trust to the other, and anticipating a world which, in bold contrast to ordinary experience, is amenable to the dialogical gesture, to the attentive, caring gesture of one to the other.

Dialogue is guided by a trust and turning and thus opening oneself to another, a vow of attentive care, one will not be rebuffed, misunderstood, or hurt.

Faith therefore reaches beyond the precincts of secular experience and assumes or anticipates an alternative messianic reality.

So conceived, faith may also be the path to the long for second naivete, second innocence.

Or from the shores of the messianic islands, wherever faith brings us, we do not, indeed cannot forget the raging waters of unredeemed time, but view them with what Ernst Simon calls an optimistic skepticism, a skepticism emboldened by hope, and alternatively, a critical messianism, a critical evaluation of the present informed by a vision of the future.

Both Buber and Rosenzweig presented their respective conceptions of Judaic faith as a path to this renewed and somber innocence, and also as an alternative to the ersatz, the false community and solidarity profit by nationalism, rather than the solidarity of shared pride and sentiment, emotions that are notoriously mercurial and are often defined over and against the other who is not a member of one’s group.

They raise the vision of bonds forged in faith, of love, and mutual trust.

Incredible.

Paul Mendesflor never forgot the raging waters of unredeemed time.

Just last month, a Hebrew festrift was published with essays by dozens of Paul Mendesflor’s students, which they presented to him at a conference at the Hebrew University on the occasion of his 80th birthday.

The volume is called “Is There Still a Place for Tikkun Olam?”

Throughout his life, Paul Mendesflor was part of, or started, countless Jewish-Palestinian dialogue groups, because most of all, what he believed in was dialogue.

I think it is not too pretty a thought to think that in this, he was following directly in the footsteps of Martin Buber, and Judah Magnus, and all the other members of B’rit Shalom, Gershom Shalom, Shmuel Hugo Bergman, Akiva Ernst Simon, Henrietta Zold, Zalman Chokin, and Shlomo Dov Goitin, to name a few, who aimed, as the B’rit Shalom bylaws said, “to pave a path of understanding between Hebrews and Arabs, leading to shared life in Palestine on the foundation of perfect equality of political rights between the two nations, each with broad autonomy, and working together for the sake of developing the land.”

Paul Mendesflor knew that there was more of a chasm between the two peoples than dialogue could quickly bridge, but this was his second naivete, a belief that listening and understanding and treating those around you as people of dignity and spirit and depth is always enough to justify itself.

One of the first books that Paul Mendesflor ever published, more than 40 years ago, was a collection of writings by Martin Buber that he called “A Land of Two People, Martin Buber on Jews and Arabs,” writings in which Martin Buber described how and why it is possible (as Paul Mendesflor put it in his introduction to the book) “to find a prophetic solution to the moral predicaments involved in the Zionist settlement in Palestine, a solution not based on cunning, needless violence and egotistical self-assertion, but on dialogue and mutual accommodation.”

In his introduction to the second edition of the book, 20 years ago, Paul Mendesflor wrote “In the face of mounting suicide bombings, the government of the State of Israel has embarked on the construction of a wall separating the Israeli nation from its Palestinian neighbors.

Meandering the length of the land, the wall lacerates not only the biblical landscape but also the hope that Jew and Arab would live one day as good neighbors.”

For Martin Buber, who nurtured these hopes for his more than 60 years of active involvement in the Zionist movement, the wall would have symbolized the realization of his darkest foreboding that, lest the Jews and the Arabs learn to share the country they both regard and cherish as their home, the land the Jews hold to be their ancestral patrimony and the land in which the Arabs have dwelt for centuries, mutual fear and enmity would consume them in endless conflict.

Walls, of course, are constructed not only with concrete.

They are erected whenever we allow our neighbors, as Robert Frost suggests in his poem, to move in darkness, to see only their silhouette and thus to remain blissfully ignorant of who they may truly be.”

Just a couple of months ago, Paul Mendesflor said this about October 7th and our war today in Gaza.

Here in Israel, of course, at the moment we’re engaged in a very difficult war, but it’s only one chapter and that unfortunately, as I see it, and certainly as Buber had, an unfortunate series of inability or refusal for Jews to see the reality of Palestinians and Palestinian Christians and Muslims for the most part, to see the spiritual and existential reality of the Jews.

We just try to avoid one another in order not to accommodate the reality of each other in the land that we are destined to share.

And if I may just say something about dialogue, at its heart is a fundamental difference between hearing the voice of the other and listening to the voice of the other, to the soul of all its torments and hopes and dreams, theological and religious concerns of the other, which often is not heard in the spoken word, but somehow you have to listen to the heartbeat of the other, the soul.

A hundred years ago, Judah Magnus said that night on Scopus that merely being here in a place where we can “learn and teach without fear or hatred all that Judaism has forged and created, a place which everyone who seeks to clarify and investigate the essence of Judaism will cloister, a place where we will speak Hebrew, a place where Jews of every imaginable background and every known belief, speaking how many languages, bearing how many traditions, praying in how many ways, and rejecting prayer with how many reasons, united mostly by a shared belief that sensitive study, attentive discussion, and intellectual honesty can together go a long way towards answering the questions that need to be answered and solving the problems that need to be solved, here we will be able to achieve an understanding of ourselves and the world that is unlike the understanding we would reach in any other place.”

And taking off the shelf this week for the thousandth time and surely not the last, the many books of Judah Bauer and Paul Mendesflor, may their memories be for a blessing.

It is easy to see that, although many questions remain to be answered and many terrible problems remain to be solved, it is easy to see how right Judah Magnus was.